/**
 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
 * or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
 * distributed with this work for additional information
 * regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file
 * to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
 * "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
 * with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *
 *     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 *
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */
package cn.edu.thu.laud.utils.serde;

/**
 * Simple interface to allow users to create their own serialization schemes
 * @author zhuoan
 *
 */
public interface Serializer {

	/**
	 * Get the bytes for the serialized object
	 * @param value
	 * @return
	 */
	public byte[] getBytes(Object value);
	
	
	/**
	 * Get the object for the bytes
	 * @param <T>
	 * @param bytes
	 * @return
	 */
	public <T> T getObject(byte[] bytes);
	
	/**
	 * Return the maximum number of bytes this object could have when serialized
	 */
	public int size(Object value);
	
	
}
